LONDON (Reuters) - Two people died and 73 were injured Friday when London's third nail bomb in two weeks ripped through a gay pub in the Soho entertainment district.
John Pooley, London Ambulance incident coordinator, told Reuters there were two dead, 13 seriously wounded including two who had limbs amputated, and 60 walking wounded.
"I haven't seen anything like it for a long long time," Pooley said.
The area was crowded with foreign tourists, theatergoers and Londoners visiting the district on a mild spring evening at the start of a long weekend holiday.
A police spokesman said the bomb went off at 6:37 p.m. local time at the Admiral Duncan pub in Old Compton Street, causing what one eyewitness said was "absolute carnage." The explosion triggered panic in the area and ambulances struggled through the maze of small streets to get to victims.
"There was a huge blast. I looked around and there were people bleeding everywhere," Huseyin Derin, who was sipping coffee in a nearby cafe when the bomb exploded, told Reuters.
Derin said it appeared a single explosion at the rear of the pub sent shards of glass into pedestrians outside and collapsed part of the ceiling.
The attack came one week after a nail bomb left seven injured in Brick Lane, the heart of London's Bangladeshi community. Two weeks ago, another exploded in a largely black area of Brixton in the south of the capital, injuring 39 people.
White supremacists have claimed responsibility for the two previous blasts, and police warned that further attacks could follow.
Home Secretary (interior minister) Jack Straw canceled a trip to rush back to London after the latest incident cast a new shadow over its once proud reputation as one of the world's safest cities.
"This is a terrible outrage committed by people with no humanity," Straw said in a statement.
As well as the three bombings, a top female television news anchor was shot dead, execution-style, last Monday in broad daylight outside her home.
Mike Ross, editor of a gay publication called The Pink Paper, said he had warned readers the homosexual community could be the next target of the extreme right wing.
"The recent bombs were seen to be targeting minority communities, which the gay community is to some extent," he told reporters, adding he had no warning of an attack.
Roger Goode, spokesman for the gay association Stonewall said the pub was an exclusively gay establishment and there was no question who the intended victims were.
"We had anticipated this for a week, because there's no question we would be targeted by such an organization. The gay community was definitely the target here," he told Reuters.
The bombs in Brixton and Brick Lane were believed to be the work of a right-wing group, Combat 18.
"This is a very small, elite, Nazi operation," said Gerry Gable of Searchlight, an organization devoted to battling violent racist groups in Britain.
"They hate black people, they hate gay people and they hate Jews," he said. "They want to spread terror."